


there's a menace in my bed (can you see his silhouette)

by voxofthevoid



Series: tear me to pieces, skin to bone (hello, welcome home) [5]
Category: Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Epilogue, Implied/Referenced Torture, M/M, POV Outsider, Voyeurism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-19
Updated: 2020-08-19
Packaged: 2021-03-06 03:53:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,081
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25977016
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/voxofthevoid/pseuds/voxofthevoid
Summary: Bucky Barnes and Steve Rogers. A story for the ages. If only they knew—but what would it have changed, really?
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes & Natasha Romanov, James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers, Steve Rogers & Natasha Romanov
Series: tear me to pieces, skin to bone (hello, welcome home) [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1702297
Comments: 53
Kudos: 312





	there's a menace in my bed (can you see his silhouette)

**Author's Note:**

> And here we go, folks! It’s a wrap.
> 
> The art is all kocuria's; you can find more of her content on [tumblr](https://kocuria.tumblr.com/)!

* * *

* * *

  
Natasha watches the video twice.

Nick’s with her the first time, the two of them grim-faced as the naked, writhing bodies on the screen fade to black and is replaced by the Winter Soldier’s cold blue eyes.

“Thank you,” says Steve Rogers, the Winter Soldier, the first Captain America, and god, they were all _fools_. “For putting him in my path. I’m grateful, really. But if you keep coming after us, I’ll kill you and make him watch. Or maybe he’ll do it himself. You can always try to find out. But I wouldn’t advise it.”

The video ends. Nick stops it before it can loop back.

The silence that follows is suffocating. It takes longer than it should for Natasha to find her voice.

“When?”

“This morning. Strike Bravo busted two of his safe houses. Former Hydra properties, it was in the files he gave us. Whole place was wiped clean. Not even a single bullet casing, nothing we could use. Except this.”

“You’re saying he saw this coming.”

“The motherfucker isn’t hiding it.” There is venom is Nick’s voice, but it’s subdued enough that Natasha shoots him a sideways glance that goes ignored. “Even when we find him—between him and Barnes, even what’s left of Strike Alpha is useless.”

 _Even you’re useless_ , Nick doesn’t say, but Natasha’s always been good at hearing things left carefully unvoiced.

She doesn’t take offense. It’s not anything she hasn’t thought to herself, more times than she can count, these last two years. Clint’s more vocal about it, but his frustration is always directed at himself, never her, because that’s the kind of person he is. They’re good at compartmentalizing, her and Clint. Bucky hits close to home, but they manage.

There are nights when they can’t. She has spent her fair share of nights on the bathroom floor, rubbing Clint’s back as he alternates between violent nausea and enraged grief. And he’s returned the favor, sparring with her until he’s half dead and she’s got half a hope of sleeping through the night without thinking of all the people she has failed.

Bucky isn’t the first one, he’s just the most recent. The rawest wound of them all.

“Does Tony know?”

Nick snorts.

“No. These aren’t on the S.H.I.E.L.D server.”

“You want to hide it from him? That won’t end well.”

“Stark’s going to go apeshit when he sees this. And that would be what, the fifth tantrum he’s throwing over Barnes? I can’t afford any more superhero disasters in my hand, Romanoff.”

Natasha inclines her head, curving her lips into a careful smile. Nick’s not wrong. Tony doesn’t deal well with helplessness, least of all when someone he cares about is in danger. And he did care about Bucky. The feeling seemed mutual, but well, the one time Tony caught up with the two of them, it was Bucky who shot out his arc reactor. A careful shot, meant to disable and not harm, but it sent a clear message.

FRIDAY is still why they get whatever scraps of information they do, but Tony has stopped going after them, not that he’s stopped his self-destructive spirals over the whole mess.

“What are we going to do?”

Nick doesn’t reply immediately, but it’s not a thoughtful silence. And Natasha knows, even before he opens his mouth, what he has decided.

“Nothing.”

* * *

* * *

The second time, she’s alone.

It’s no less disturbing when she knows what’s coming. The first one’s the worst, but it’s the second that makes fear crowd up her throat. The terror on Bucky’s face was horrifying, but it gave her hope. It’s not even the acceptance in the second video that scares her. It’s the adoration.

And then, the message at the end. She watches it, again and again and again, and she doesn’t even know what she’s looking for.

“Thank you for putting him in my path. I’m grateful, really. But if you keep coming after us, I’ll kill you and make him watch.”

He smiles, and Natasha half expects the screen to crack in half. She knew the Soldier. He’s there in the memories that are broken and blurred even now, memories she’s long since given up hope of ever getting back. But she knows him in bits and pieces—a large hand ruffling her hair, a booted kick that breaks her ribs, chapped lips pressing to her forehead, a hoarse whisper to _run and never come back, Natashen'ka_ , gloved fingers bruising her neck.

And a clearer memory, from years later, of familiar eyes under a black mask and a knife scraping bone.

She has no memory of him smiling. The one on the screen is alien to her.

“Or maybe he’ll do it himself. You can always try to find out. But I wouldn’t advise it.”

Bucky stopped him the last time. Natasha is under no illusions that he didn’t pay a price for it, but she’s just as aware that the Soldier—Rogers—won’t kill him, that Bucky might be the one person in the world who can grab a gun out of the Soldier’s hand and not get his throat torn out for it.

 _I wouldn’t want to be liked by a ghost_ , she warned Bucky, in what feels like another lifetime. She’s had her fair share of them. Now, she thinks Bucky must have already known that this particular ghost belonged to him.

 _It doesn’t tend to end well_ , she said, because it didn’t for her, for the man the Winter Soldier used to be, before they wiped the Red Room and its girls from his mind and sent him to hunt them down a labyrinthine maze. Some of them survived. Most didn’t. Natasha did. It’s what made her.

She thinks it made him too. He cared, when he trained them. There was something of a person in there, and she didn’t find that in his eyes when he carved a smile into her face and sank a knife into her gut and left her to bleed out beside the engineer she was meant to protect.

She can’t find a person in the eyes on the screen either, but she knows Bucky can. He’s kinder than Natasha, who has always been a survivor first and sentimental last, but maybe he’s crueler too, to not give up the ghost.

Bucky Barnes and Steve Rogers. A story for the ages. If only they knew—but what would it have changed, really?

**Author's Note:**

> I’d love to hear your thoughts <3

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [collab: voxofthevoid](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23361448) by [kocuria-visuals (kocuria)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kocuria/pseuds/kocuria-visuals)




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